Poet Sjohnna McCray's life provides plenty of material for his debut collection, Rapture. The son of an African American Vietnam vet who died in his 40s and a Korean prostitute, McCray mines the complications of his family life and upbringing in Cincinnati. Overcoming the disadvantages of diabetes and his father's postwar employment as a janitor, McCray put himself through Ohio University, earned an MFA at the University of Virginia and an MA from Teachers College at Columbia University before winning the 2015 Walt Whitman Award. His poems explore the nuances of race, fatherhood, disease, sexuality and loneliness that his background inevitably threw his way.
In "How to Move," for example, he recalls that "Men on the corner used to holler/ that dad was a high yellow nigger/ or if the sun had darkened him/ and pulled the red to the surface of his skin,/ a red nigger." In the same poem, race becomes even more of an issue when his father loses his leg and has to choose from the prosthesis makers' color options: "perfect shades of negroness/ for limbless negroes, every negro/ matched to a swatch or chart with names/ like fingernail polish." Desire flairs in "Midlife Crisis in Boots" as the narrator is transfixed by a rodeo calf roper, but libido is tempered by commitment in the title poem: "Cast/ before one another, blemishes apparent/ ...we refuse to yield/ back into being singular." With each poem in this very personal collection, McCray digs deeply into his experience to craft an identity that embraces the complexity of his life without denying it. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.